Srikanth is a postdoctoral fellow at ICSI, Berkeley. His research interests are in the design and performance of Networked Systems. Currently his research focuses on performance issues in broadband networks — both fixed line and mobile. His work has won the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize, and the IMC Community Contribution Award, the Georgia Tech CS Dissertation Award, and has been published as a Research Highlight by the Communications of the ACM.

Abstract:

As home networks see increasingly faster downstream throughput speeds, a natural question is whether users are benefiting from these faster speeds or simply facing performance bottlenecks in their own home networks. In this work, we study a simple question: Are users’ downstream throughput bottlenecks in their home networks or in their access ISPs? Although our question is simple, answering it on a large-scale deployment is challenging because accurate measurements require instrumentation of a home router, which is too resource-constrained for many existing throughput analysis tools. In this work, we identify lightweight metrics that can accurately identify whether a throughput bottleneck lies inside or outside a user’s home network and develop a detection algorithm that accurately locates these bottlenecks. We validate this algorithm in controlled settings and report on two deployments, one of which is the FCC deployment with 2,652 homes in the United States. We find that wireless bottlenecks are more common than access-link bottlenecks—particularly for home networks with downstream throughput greater than 20 Mbps, where access-link bottlenecks are relatively rare. In homes with a wireless bottleneck, it is equally likely that only one device experiences the bottleneck as it is for all devices to experience the wireless bottleneck simultaneously.

Research and Education TrackSpeakers:Michael Sinatra, ESnet; Julie Percival, University of Texas at Dallas; Michael Smitasin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Murat Yuksel, University of Nevada, Reno;

Research and Education TrackSpeakers:Michael Sinatra, ESnet; Julie Percival, University of Texas at Dallas; Michael Smitasin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Murat Yuksel, University of Nevada, Reno;

Research and Education TrackSpeakers:Michael Sinatra, ESnet; Julie Percival, University of Texas at Dallas; Michael Smitasin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Murat Yuksel, University of Nevada, Reno;

Research and Education TrackSpeakers:Michael Sinatra, ESnet; Julie Percival, University of Texas at Dallas; Michael Smitasin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Murat Yuksel, University of Nevada, Reno;